Language Politics in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: The Crisis over the Future of Serbian

Abstract

The status of the Serbian standard language in the years since the breakup of Yugoslavia has been controversial. Serbian linguists were ill prepared for the demise of the unified Serbo-Croatian language in 1991 and found themselves scrambling to create a new linguistic order. While die Croatian linguists in socialist Yugoslavia had long advocated a separate literary language called Croatian, rather than Croato-Serbian, the Serbs had continued to insist on the joint language and readily accepted the term Serbo-Croatian. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Serbs finally had to recognize that given Croatian and Bosnian-Muslim linguistic separatism, a joint literary language was no longer possible. In this paper, I examine the consequences of the breakup of Serbo-Croatian for Serbs in the Yugoslav successor states, especially in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). I discuss the emergence of three ideologically opposed factions of Serbian linguists. The debate among Serbian linguists has been heated and acrimonious, reflecting broader political struggles within the FRY. I suggest that politically motivated turmoil in Serbian linguistic circles has put the New Serbian on a chaotic, unstable, and unpredictable path into the future.